Two Communiqués, and a Commander’s Dilemma

Winter was fast approaching, yet degree by degree, the temperature was rising under the small Army garrison in Charleston Harbor. Even the troops’ commander, Maj. Robert Anderson – usually cool to the point of iciness – was feeling the heat.

As November turned into December, it became increasingly clear to Anderson and his officers that their position at Fort Moultrie might soon need to be defended – and from attackers based not in the mouth of Charleston Harbor, toward which the fort’s gun platforms faced, but onshore. When the new commander arrived, South Carolina’s legislature had just unanimously passed a resolution calling for a statewide convention to discuss secession, and local militia had placed the American military arsenal in town under guard, ostensibly to defend it in case of a slave revolt. On Nov. 29, the Charleston Mercury published a draft ordinance of secession. Visiting the city daily to procure fresh provisions, men of the Moultrie garrison heard bands playing the Marseillaise and saw the streets draped with banners bearing slogans like “Good-bye, Yankee Doodle” and “Let Us Bury the Union’s Dead Carcass.”

The state’s governor – a wealthy planter named William Henry Gist – was smacking his aristocratic lips over the glorious future that awaited an independent South Carolina. In one address to the legislature at the end of November, he whipped up his listeners with talk of laws that would reopen the African slave trade, officially declare white men the ruling race, and punish “summarily and severely, if not with death” any person caught espousing abolitionist views. The city was filling up with militiamen who drilled under the state flag – a white banner with a palmetto tree and single red star – and spoke openly of hauling down the Stars and Stripes that flew above the harbor fortifications. On Dec. 1, a couple of Charleston gentlemen visited Moultrie and in the course of conversation with the officers remarked, with casual effrontery, that once the state officially seceded the Yankees would either have to surrender the fort or see it taken by force.

Major Anderson received two important official communiqués during that first week of December. Each added its share to his mounting sense of powerlessness and dread.

Library of CongressCaptain Truman Seymour

The first, on Dec. 3, was handed to him by one of his own company captains, a lean, introspective Yankee named Truman Seymour, son of a Methodist minister from Vermont. Anderson had tasked Seymour with assessing Fort Moultrie’s defensibility. His conclusions were far from encouraging. The Carolinians were unlikely to attempt a frontal assault on the federal garrison, the captain suggested, since success by such means would be costly. Nor would they settle in for a protracted siege, effective though this might prove: given the atmosphere among the hotheaded secessionist volunteers, it seemed unlikely they could restrain themselves for so long.

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No, Capt. Seymour reasoned, the enemy would attempt to seize Moultrie by stealth or stratagem – “against which the fort & garrison are indeed weak.” The federal troops’ small number – just a few dozen men and a brass band – was, of course, their greatest liability. But their physical position made matters much worse. Wealthy Charlestonians had built summer houses on the heights overlooking the citadel, and there was even a small shop a stone’s throw from the outer walls. In short, Fort Moultrie was about as defensible as a public park, Seymour wrote – especially if the attack came by night:

The assailants can rush from any hiding place, and gain the parapet before the garrison can do so. At Cohen’s garden they are 30 yards from the NE salient wall… They have the advantage of clear faculties, eager & sharpened by a matured plan – we the disadvantage of hesitation & uncertainty, of the confusion consequent upon haste & the stupefaction of a scarcely broken sleep.

Even posting round-the-clock lookouts all around the battlements would avail the defenders little: “Any faithless sentinel – or a faithful one stifled with chloroform – would prove our ruin.” In short, Seymour concluded, “the work is so weak against surprises that it may justly be concluded that in that way we shall fall, if at all.” The only way to defend Moultrie was by some preemptive move: “the country will be ashamed of us and of our science if every possible precaution is not taken to defeat an attack by surprise & we are bound to do our best to foresee & prevent.”

Yet would “the country” – or, more important, the Buchanan administration and its officials at the War Department – allow any move to head off the secessionist militiamen? The other message that Major Anderson received that week suggested they would not.

This second communiqué came directly from Washington on Dec. 4. Col. Samuel Cooper, adjutant general of the Army, informed Major Anderson flatly that no additional troops would be forthcoming, since Secretary of War John B. Floyd felt that this would only exacerbate the tensions in Charleston. Nor, indeed, was Anderson to make any move whatsoever – even a defensive one – that might provoke the excitable Carolinians. But not to worry, Cooper blithely assured the major: “It is believed, from information thought to be reliable, that an attack will not be made on your command.”

Could Anderson confide his fort, his men’s lives and perhaps even the future of the nation to such vague promises? Could he, for that matter, trust his own superiors at the War Department? Perhaps not: within a matter of months, both Colonel Cooper and Secretary Floyd would wear generals’ uniforms in the service of the Confederate States.

Of course, Anderson didn’t know that. Only one thing seemed clear: the two most sacred duties of every military leader – obeying his superiors and defending his post – seemed to be pulling him in opposite directions.

Adam Goodheart is the author of the forthcoming book “1861: The Civil War Awakening.” He lives in Washington, D.C., and on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where he is the Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.

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One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, Americans went to war with themselves. Disunion revisits and reconsiders America’s most perilous period — using contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded.